AT&T said its 4G LTE deployment will be "substantially complete" this summer amid a mixed second quarter where sales fell short of expectations, but churn hit a record low.

The company reported second quarter earnings of $3.5 billion, or 68 cents a share, on revenue of $32.6 billion, up 1.6 percent from a year ago. Net earnings included 2 cents a share in Leap Wireless integration costs and a 8 cents a share gain on its América Móvil equity investment. Excluding those items, AT&T's earnings were 62 cents a share.

Wall Street was looking for non-GAAP earnings of 63 cents a share on revenue of $33.22 billion.

As for the outlook, AT&T projected 2014 revenue growth of about 5 percent.

On the wireless front, AT&T performed well with 1 million net postpaid additions and a postpaid churn of 0.86. Wireless revenue was up 3.7 percent from a year ago.

The company added 700,000 postpaid smartphone customers to end the quarter with 61 million total subscribers. Including upgrades and new subscribers, AT&T said it moved 1.6 million new postpaid smartphones.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CN...
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